| Written by Manon on September 16, 2021

With 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Michael Haneke gives us one of his best movies so far. Also known for The Piano Teacher, Funnny Games and Happy End amongst others, the famous Austrian director is making his way around a new version of things but also a new version of cinema. Of course, he’s not the first one using this technique of fragmentation – and probably won’t be the last either – but he’s doing it and he’s doing it perfectly by even making it one of his signatures. This fragmentation is very interesting for the watcher (especially if they own a copy of the DVD because they’ll then realize that every fragment is chronologically picture on the cover — see this photo as a reference) because besides giving a special dynamic to the movie, it also keeps the watcher on alert.

The thing is, multiple stories are happening at once – from the young immigrant to the old lonely man – and they’re all mixed up together, fragmentally, creating a patchwork of their lives. Although they don’t seem to have anything in common except all living in the same country, in the end we discover that they actually do have something in common, or at least four of them (the mains). And so it’s just by the end of the movie that we realize how people who seem to have nothing related to each others can end up at the same time at the same place in a certain situation that will lead them all to the same end.

The beauty of this movie is actually in the technique used as well as in the story told all along. Both of those things reunited together give us a true cinematic masterpiece.

The plot of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is hard to sum up but this is a good thing. The movie is so vast and gives the watcher so many things, lives and stories to look at that in the end, it won’t seem like a movie at all. It kind of just make the person watching this a kind of extern point of view to a few people’s life story as if they were watching someone walking in the street or buying something in a shop. The movie then becomes a great collection of beautiful life moments that are so basic but so unique at the same time, making it impossible to describe in just a few words but that are worth watching entirely.

The fact that the movie seems to deal with a mass murder connecting all of these people together is also a very interesting aspect to it. In fact, this story could be interpreted and stage nowadays without any problem because it is still a very actual topic and that’s one of the things that makes this movie a timeless one and so easy to watch even almost two decades after its first release.

Esthetically, the movie is absolutely well done. However, a few fragments seem a bit to slow or kind of slow down the movie when there’s no need to. It doesn’t break the rhythm because there isn’t really one but it does can seem boring if too long or happening to often (which is, hopefully, not the case). But no matter what, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is still one of the best movies out there and an absolute must-seen.

About Sebastian Stan’s character: Sebastian appears in only one scene and his character doesn’t talk. He doesn’t have a name, barely has an age and interact only for a few seconds with one of the protagonists. His character is one of the people who are passing by in the main characters life and who doesn’t have a very big importance in it, even if he represents an allusion to the immigration and the acceptance of one country of an immigrant. In fact, he’s interacting with an immigrant kid of his age and play with him while waiting for a train. He doesn’t seem to care about the fact that this kid is a stranger (how could he know, since they don’t speak?) and still choose to goof around with him no matter what, showing that the acceptance can be very easy and natural.

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